SOASTA, the California based performance testing provider, yesterday announced the release of SOASTA CloudTest Pro, an appliance based service targeted at enterprises and startups wanting to test the performance of web and mobile applications. This is available as an appliance for an annual subscription along with their existing solutions like CloudTest On-Demand (public cloud service) and CloudTest Appliance (targeted at internal systems).

What is SOASTA and why it is interesting?

SOASTA (The name derives from Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and System Test Architecture (STA)) has been in somewhat of a stealth mode for four years now. They are offering both cloud based and On-Premise solutions that will help organizations test the performance of their web properties and applications. Such a performance testing will help organizations prepare for any kind of load/traffic situations. Imagine an ecommerce merchant losing money from the abandoned carts due to bad site performance. I am not sure if you have abandoned carts like that but I have definitely left the purchase process halfway because of slow site response. Remember those days when we will see Fail Whale on Twitter both as soon as we get up in the morning and before going to bed in the night. Such user experiences leads to disastrous consequences for the businesses. SOASTA has positioned themselves to help businesses foresee such situations and prepare themselves to meet the challenges.

Performance testing is not something new. But SOASTA is interesting because it takes advantage of the cloud to offer the kind of scale that was not available anytime in the past. Gone are the days when people do the performance testing from inside with a handful of servers and then hope for the best to happen. Now, with cloud scale, it is possible to do a test that mimics real time situations. If you expect your web app to be accessed by 100K users simultaneously, one can easily test it with SOASTA. Gone are the days when such performance test providers buying expensive infrastructure from around the world and lose big when the expected customers fail to turn up. With the advent of cloud computing, the whole landscape has turned upside down. Organizations can easily perform tests that mimic real world situations at a much affordable rate and providers can provision virtual machines needed for the testing on the fly after their customers swipe their credit cards. More importantly, they could shut down these resources after the tests are done which helps providers like SOASTA offer pay per use model in their On-Demand offering.

By architecting a performance testing application that could take advantage of a distributed architecture effectively, SOASTA has shown the world how cloud applications can be architected. This has a potential to unleash a new trend of vertical clouds targeted towards niche use cases. Even though I am really impressed with how SOASTA offers cost efficiency and scale by taking advantage of the cloud, I would consider the lesson we all can learn from the way they have architected their application as equally impressive and important.

Gotcha, what about SOASTA CloudTest Pro?

SOASTA CloudTest Pro is designed for businesses with internal testing teams that want full command of their performance testing. It supports continuous testing in the lab and in live production environments, testing from internal and external sources, and real-time resolution of performance issues. In short, it takes their On-Demand offering and lets customers run from inside of the firewall. This is something that will be more palatable for the enterprises than a pure public cloud version. With CloudTest Pro, enterprises can test their internal facing applications from inside the firewall and external facing applications from the cloud. In fact, with the proliferation of mobile devices in the enterprises and as organizations become more global with distributed workforce, it is important to test their applications from both internal sources and external sources. Clearly, this release is well suitable for modern day enterprises.

Access to SOASTA’s Global Test Cloud: The largest global network of public and private clouds available for immediate test deployment.

Conclusion

If the recent Superbowl is an example, SOASTA has already proved how critical such a performance testing is for the cloud based world. SOASTA methodology helped Denny’s prepare for nearly 1700% increase in the traffic after they announced the Super Sunday free breakfast offer. In this increasingly cloudy world with location independent and device independent access to web applications, any downtime will be disastrous for businesses and performance testing simulating the real world scenario is critical. SOASTA is all set to be the market leader by being the first one to offer this unique cloud based testing. Keep them on your radar.

Director, OpenShift Strategy at Red Hat. Founder of Rishidot Research, a research community focused on services world. His focus is on Platform Services, Infrastructure and the role of Open Source in the services era. Krish has been writing @ CloudAve from its inception and had also been part of GigaOm Pro Analyst Group. The opinions expressed here are his own and are neither representative of his employer, Red Hat, nor CloudAve, nor its sponsors.